Two bad ones leap to my mind. My g/f Sandy (new bride and new cook) had her first dinner party years ago. She served cornish game hens, woefully undercooked, the meat pink. I ate it, it was awful. Later on I realized just how lucky I was not to have gotten really ill.

Another time, when I was living in Brooklyn, our next door neighbor (Italian American) invited us over and cooked her specialty...a very gooey lasagna. I HATE lasagna and kept surreptiously transferring large amounts to my sister's plate under the table when our hostess's back was turned. Alas, she shrieked, oh, you LOVE my lasagna, I'm getting you MORE and piled my plate high again. Ugh.

Got any stories?

A friend's famous "Beef With Wine Sauce," that she was so proud of, she submitted it to a recipe site, and was indignant that they turned it down. I started to explain to her about Boeuf Bourguignon, but decided it wasn't worth it.

It was stew beef with canned mushrooms and cooking wine, served over Minute Rice.

For what it's worth, she doesn't like my cooking either. :-D

A puree of spinach and pears that would have looked and tasted better if it had come out of a Gerber's jar. Ick.

I have no room to complain, though. I know I have served some truly dreadful food in my day. I'm what you might call an erratic cook.

Spaghetti made with breakfast sausage (which I dislike even at breakfast) and a can of tomato sauce (plain) along with iceberg lettuce and bottled thousand island dressing which I hate in any form.

Fish chili.

"Homemade" sushi.

OMG. I've never seen that combination of words before.

I have a nice female friend who likes to throw dinner parties, but refuses to learn about cuts of meat and how to prepare them. She once bought three pounds of beef tenderloin, and on the advice of her boyfriend, cut the tenderloin into ½ inch filets and baked them for 30 minutes in the oven with Worcestershire sauce. People were late so she kept the warm in the oven. They were well-done and inedible. She thought the marinade would make them moist. She also makes this awful sweet potato/Idaho potato mash, in which she forgets to put butter. She just adds milk. Needless to say, I always end up rather drunk at her shindigs. Her cutting board is (no kidding) 5 by 8 inches. She picks olive oil by the prettiest labels.

LOL, these stories are hilarious!!! I once had another g/f heat up several cans of Chef Boyardee, make one of those iceberg lettuce salads, a semi-soft loaf of Italian bread...and call it a dinner party. Please...if you are a non-cook, just pick up some good stuff from a takeout place or order in Chinese!

Dear God!
No wonder I like to have people over to MY house. I'd rather do the entertaining.

Once upon a time I enjoyed entertaining. No more. I foot the bill for dinner in a decent restaurant. No shopping, slicing, dicing, fretting, nor cleaning up. I've started using my Waterford and sterling for me. Otherwise it would sit and just look pretty. I still haven't gone so far as to serve Ms. Sasha her kibble in crystal, but I may sometime in the future.

Decades ago I went to dinner at the home of a couple who was very influential. As we arrived at the appointed time, the wife proudly told us she, herself, was frying chicken for us. Three hours later, I got served a piece of chicken (the back) with some salad greens...and tried to hide my stomach rumbles. Her dessert was chocolate mousse...which I had never had before and neither had she because she served it to us in huge pudding bowls. It was very good and more than made up for the lack of calories I had had at dinner. (I can not eat chocolate mousse to this day...just a case of too much of a good thing.)

I will squell on myself. A long time ago, I was out in the forest, well I don't know what you would call it because I had to build a brush lean-to and rough it for the night. I had no food so I devised a string and hook. I caught me a brim fish which is boney to begin with. I decided to build be a fire to flame off the bacteria after I skinned it. I have never tastsed something so "raw"! It was worse than sushi!

I have tasted other people's bad cooking but I usually try not to say anything unless I am about to get sick in which case I try to quietly excuse myself and go to the bathroom!

Every year and thanksgiving, the females in the family try to get me to say which of their dishes taste the best. I tell them that I am not getting in the middle of that game!

Click to view attachmentAn Indian chicken dish, with a long, black hair coiled tightly around a bone. Runner up: tougher than nails, venison steak.

Yes, ditto on "homemade sushi". One simply has to know what one is doing.... and my friend Gary and his wife did not....

Well, it happened to me - again - last night. Mr. Salinqmind has an adorable, lovable auntie who is Greek. We love.her.to.death. Every time we go over to visit on a holiday, she serves the same damn thing. EVERY SINGLE TIME. A large salad of dark, dark greens with a few chopped tomatoes, oil and vinegar dressing. A huge vat of gooey, gluey, bland pastito - ziti mixed with a white eggy sauce and some kind of ground meat (lamb? pork?). That's it. It actually doesn't taste too bad, but a little goes a long way. And it's invariably lukewarm and seems ...undercooked. A casserole should be served hot, with crispy corners, no? Well, fine dinin' is one thing, and family dinin' is another, I guess.

This thread is making me laugh but also rather nauseous! :-)

Oh, I think the worst thing I've been served, I'm sorry to say, is a meal prepared by a friend. My friend and her husband made some sort of barbequed chicken on a squewer dish. The dish was nothing exceptional in terms of ingredients but what made the meal memorable was the fact that after 10 minutes they ran out of gas for the barbeque. My friends sort of shrugged and then placed the half-cooked chicken kebabs on plates along with a rice dish. My friends proceed to "dig in"! I cautiously cut open my own food and seeing raw meat asked if they minded if I microwaved my meal. The funny thing is they seemed surprised that I was fussed.

Oh and another time I ordered "Whole red snapper" in a restaurant. Never again! I was chatting with a friend and eating my fish when suddenly I looked down and inches away from my mouth, sitting on my fork along with the couscous was the fish's eye! Yuck. Not an olive - the eye. Ewh. It (the eye!) had been sitting in my bed of couscous. I complained to the server ("excuse me, there's an eyeball in my couscous!" and became upset when she shrugged, said nothing and walked away. Poor woman - I then discovered (after loudly complaining to the manager) that she was an exchange student who spoke no English. I was so "grossed out" and made such a loud complain the manager hurried me and my friend out of the restaurant and declared the meal was free. We were at least happy to get a free bottle of wine out of the meal but never ever again will I order "a whole" red snapper or any other fish. Ewh!

Elizabeth Damon, I will happily pluck out the fish eyes you won't eat. I will even take the whole head, and if the fish is steamed, the tail.

One of the techniques my grandfather would use so that I would behave at the table, was to say, if I didn't cry during lunch, that he would let me have the fish eyes. If I didn't talk at all, he would let me eat the tail.

I once barbequed snapper, one whole snapper per guest since they were small, and as I was serving them, one of the female guests fainted from the sight of a fish head. Her head just dropped onto the table. We had to call the paramedics because the smelling salts were not working on her. When she later woke up in the hospital, she was mostly relieved they did not find the cocaine in her handbag.

I was 15 and visiting a friend in Manhattan for the weekend for the first time ever by myself. I felt VERY grown up to be off in NY by myself. This family was pretty well-to-do, and the parents were busy people who weren't around much. There was a nanny/maid/cook person who basically saw to my friend's needs.

It was dinner time, and I am on my best behavior for my dinner in this fancy duplex on the upper east side. It was just Hannah and me, as her parents had a dinner engagement..... the cook was making us dinner.

Plates arrive. Guess what this woman thought best to serve 2 grungy pothead 15-year-old girls? Steak Tartar and a Spinach Souffle!!! I kid you not!! So I'm sitting here looking at this mound of raw hamburger with an egg running over it, and am trying desperately to keep my cool and figure out what to do. I don't eat cooked spinach in any form -- it is one of the few things that actually makes me gag. I just can't eat it. So there's no way out, here. Ughh.

I had a few tentative bites of the ST before Hannah came to my rescue and said we wanted to go to Gristedes on the corner and get some sliced turkey. The cook scowled at us, but "Miss Hannah" was in charge, so we high-tailed it out of there and I got to eat sliced turkey and a green salad instead. PHEW!!!

Whew! Guess I've been lucky. Most of my friends are gourmet cooks. (Guess I know how to pick 'em!) Even with homemade sushi, the only homemade I ever ate was made by my nephew who knows how to make authentic "professional" sushi of the most delicious varieties. The only drawback to that was I had to pay for the ingredients which totalled about $100! Let's just hope my gourmet luck holds...

I will keep my fingers crossed that I never face this. And I will keep my finger crossed that none of my friends have or ever will feel this way about my cooking.